Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Sirens of Mars Call to Us

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Georgetown University planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson has written a beautiful book that chronicles our long quest for life on the Red Planet. That search may finally be reaching a climax with the new Perseverance rover and the beginnings of sample return. A copy of The Sirens of Mars will go to the winner of yet another What’s Up space trivia contest. In a nice coincidence, Bruce Betts will tell us where to find a brilliantly bright Mars in the night sky. Links and more are at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0902-2020-sarah-stewart-johnson-sirens-of-marsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Sirens of Mars call to us, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Georgetown University professor and planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson has written a beautiful book she calls The Sirens of Mars, Searching for Life on Another World. We'll spend some time with her in a few moments, and we'll award a copy of the book to the winner of the new space trivia contest

Bruce has cooked up for you this week. It's a nice coincidence that Mars is shining bright in the sky right now, and Bruce will tell you where to find it. Our sympathies and best wishes for a quick recovery go to everyone affected by last week's terrible storms in North America. Before Laura became a hurricane, it was a tropical storm that our own LightSail 2 snapped a picture of. That shot tops the August 28th edition of The Downlink, That shot tops the August 28th edition of The Downlink, the Planetary Society's weekly newsletter that you'll find at planetary.org slash downlink. As spectacular, or even more so, is the shadow of Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft against asteroid Ryugu.

This was minutes after the probe collected the first of two samples that are now speeding earthward. The James Webb Space Telescope passed a couple of important tests. We're now just over a year from its planned launch. And China is looking for partners. Russia and the European Space Agency have responded to calls for collaboration on a lunar base that could be visited by humans in the early 2030s. on a lunar base that could be visited by humans in the early 2030s. There's much, much more waiting for you in the downlink with a new edition every Friday. Here's a late programming note, especially for all of you who are fans of the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio.

Yeah, we were going to do the September show on time first Friday, which would be this coming Friday, the 4th. But we're going to delay that a week just because things are awfully busy right now. And Casey has some cool things in the works. So we will bring you the next Space Policy Edition on Friday, September 11th. Last week, we looked toward the end of the universe with Katie Mack. This time, we joined the search for life right next door. Sarah Stewart Johnson has written a wonderful book about humankind's fascination with the red planet for, oh, let's say forever, or at least since our ancestors noticed that red star wandering the sky. Speculation about life on Mars also goes back very far, but it's only in the last six decades that we have been visiting. Sarah is in the thick of our quest for Martian biosignatures,

signs that life may have existed up there billions of years before it seems to have appeared on Earth. It has been a troubled search, full of wrong turns and disappointments, but now, with the rover called Perseverance and the beginning of sample return, we may be on the edge of a discovery that will shake our own world. All of this is chronicled in The Sirens of Mars, Searching for Life on Another World, published by Crown. The great writing reminds me of Sasha Sagan's For Small Creatures Such as We, which is a high compliment. Sarah is Associate Professor of Planetary Science at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.,

where her lab focuses on how we find and recognize life. She has been part of the teams behind the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers and is a visiting scientist with the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA Goddard. I talked a few days ago with this former Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow. Sarah, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and thank you for this really lovely lyrical book, which I just so much enjoyed reading. Oh, thank you, Matt, And thanks so much for having me. You grabbed me right from the start of this book,

not just because I love the story you tell about our search for and our fascination with life on Mars, but because of how well you tell it. In the book's prologue, you talk about a lake in the far reaches of Australia. Here's a quote from that. I'm going to read it. In the right place with a good grip, you can pull out a crystal of gypsum severed like a shark's tooth from the jaw

of the earth. The spear tip blades are as large as your hand. When you rinse away the red mud and hold it to the light, it flashes in the sun like a gemstone. Under a microscope, you can see the tiniest of pockets within it, glinting drops of lake water sheathed in mineral hideaways, life caught in a crystalline dagger. Life caught in a crystalline dagger. That's how you caught me. It's beautiful. And of course, that's your theme in the book, this ongoing search for life on this other nearby world that is still far enough away that it's been a very slow process discovering more about it. Before we really get into the book, could you talk a little bit about what you do at Georgetown? Are you in your lab?

Sure. So I'm a planetary science professor and an astrobiologist. And the focus of our lab is in biosignature detection. So looking for biosignatures or traces of life in planetary environments. And so part of what we do is we try to understand how these signatures of life can be preserved over time. And we go out to these analog environments, places here on Earth that bear relevant similarities to other planetary environments like the ancient terrain on Mars. And we really try to learn how to look and trying to test out different approaches and different techniques. But then a big part of the lab also is analyzing data from current spacecraft and trying to design concepts for future missions, for future instruments. There's another Sarah who has been on our show and is in kind of the same line of work, Sarah Horst at Johns Hopkins. You seem to be in the same business.

Oh, we are. Sarah's a good friend. Sarah's just fantastic. She's really focused on the outer moons, moons of the outer planets, whereas I'm a little closer to home, focused on Mars. But, you know, she's just a terrific scientist and one of my favorite folks to follow on Twitter. There is, of course, life as we know it, which is largely what we have been looking for on Mars. But I know that you also are fascinated by the search for life as we don't know it. Is that something that you're also working on? Oh, it is indeed. We were funded by NASA for this project that we've been calling the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures. And that's really what we're after, trying to find

signs of life that don't presuppose any particular molecular framework or any specific underlying biochemistry. It's a big challenge because we have developed these incredibly robust ways to look for biosignatures that are associated with life as we know it. We can go out into the extreme environments here on Earth where there's very little life to begin with and use these techniques. We can use them to understand the earliest history of our own planet, looking at how certain types of molecules are preserved over geologic time. But what we're doing here is really looking for ways that we could detect things that are just really beyond the confines of our current thinking. And so looking for things like chemical complexity or energy transfer or accumulations of elements

or isotopes that are really different from what you'd expect from abiotic processes alone. Sometimes it feels like trying to imagine a color that you've never seen before, but it's one of the most exciting things that my lab is working on right now. I feel like it's a great intellectual challenge, but it's also great fun trying to imagine what other types of life you could be looking for. It is absolutely fascinating, something that we love to talk about on the show from time to time, because it does take us into such uncharted territory. Let me ask you a couple of questions. These are things that you cover in the book as well about how you got into all of this.

And I'm thinking of an experience that you had with your father many years ago that seems to partially explain how your heart and as well as your mind were first captured by Mars in the night sky. There was a trip you made out to the desert with your father. So that was when I was in my early 20s. My father had always been something of an amateur astronomer, an amateur geologist. He would like to look at the night sky. I mean, he had a pair of binoculars for most of my childhood and got a telescope when I was older. He also liked to drive over by the side of road cuts along highways and the Appalachian Mountains and go look at rocks. But he never really liked flying and we never traveled far beyond the state line when I was growing up.

But I was able to convince him when I was about 21 or 22 to get on an airplane with me and go out to Tucson. And we rented a car and we drove up to this little observatory that was called the Vega Bray Observatory. And we spent a few days there.

And the greatest thing about this little place, they had telescopes and they were these medium range telescopes where you could look at a dot in the night sky, could look at the telescope directly pointed at that dot. And you realize like, oh, wow, you know, that one's got all of these incredible moons in that polar cap, you know, that's what that little white dot at the top of this world. And this one has all of these rings. I mean, it was just an incredible experience. And it's something that I think can sometimes be lost in the age of modern astronomy, because

for a long time, every practitioner had a direct relationship with the night sky. And now so much of astronomy is done, you know, via computer, and you're not sitting out in the middle of the desert. But there was something absolutely incredible about that moment. And I'll never forget it. You remind me of one of the terrific individuals that you talk about in the book, Galileo, who I knew was the first to see Mars as a sphere, but I did not know that he speculated on whether it might be a world like our own.

He did. It was really one of the best things about writing the book was getting to dive into some of the history and all of my predecessors, you know, these planetary scientists in one form or another, stretching all the way back to Galileo. And he did speculate that there could be a world there. And, you know, he didn't want to pass judgment on what might be existing there. But he did write a letter to a colleague saying that there could be inhabitants. He mentions the possibility, but said did write a letter to a colleague saying that there could be inhabitants.

He mentions the possibility, but said he would leave it to others wiser than him. Yeah. I'm also thinking of an experience that you say in the book made you a planetary scientist. You were in Hawaii. It had to do with both the beauty and the tenacity of life. Yes. I had this incredible professor named Ray Arvidsson. He's an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. And he took all of us in a class that he was teaching off to the big island of Hawaii on a field trip. There was this moment when we were exploring the summit of Mauna Kea, which is this huge volcano. And you drive up the side of the volcano and you pass the end of the tree line.

You pass the last of the scrub. And you even have to stop to acclimatize for a few hours because the oxygen is so thin by the time you get to the very summit. And there are a lot of telescopes up there. But we were walking around this terrain, hiking about, and there's just nothing green in sight. You know, it looks almost like a crystallized bruise. It's all shards of black and gray and purple. And I was walking around, kicking at some of those volcanic rocks. some of those volcanic rocks. And at one point, one turned over and I saw that there was the smallest little fern that was growing there just against all odds. It was just the most tenacious, beautiful thing that I had seen. And it just seemed like that fern stood for all of us in this

vast emptiness, this huge wasteland. There was just this tiny splash of life. And there really was something in that moment that I think made me become a planetary scientist, or just made this idea of searching for life in the universe make sense to me. It's a striking moment, and obviously one that had great influence over you. Your studies and your work seem to have taken you all over our planet and to simulations of places that aren't on our planet. I'm thinking now of work that you did years ago with simulated Martian dust at NASA Ames, which is another great passage in the book. Yes, yes. That was a great summer.

It must have been between my sophomore and junior year in college. great summer. It was must have been between my sophomore and junior year in college. I got to be part of something called NASA's Astrobiology Academy, which is just the best program you can imagine. And I was living on the campus of Stanford University in a big house with all these other interns that were interested in astrobiology. And I had a research placement in this giant wind tunnel, the Mars Wind Tunnel that was at NASA's Ames Research Center. It was this extraordinarily large cavern. They used it originally to test buffeting of rockets. But the whole chamber could be pumped down to different pressures. And so you could pump it down to just six millibars, you know,

which is six one thousandths of our terrestrial atmospheric pressure. And we would do these experiments simulating how dust would flow through this laminar flow, wind tunnel and how it would settle onto the panels of spacecraft. We were trying to figure out what the attenuation and power would be when the Mars polar lander reached the planet. It was just this incredible experience to really kind of feel like we had our hands on the controls of this massive machine that could change fundamental things about the physical world. And there's a moment I describe in the book where I got to watch this cup of water that we put just on the other side of a thick pane of glass. And one of the graduate students had

suggested this would be a fun thing to do. And we watched as the pressure pumped down and down and down. And there was a moment where the water started to bubble and it started to boil. And then all of a sudden, right in the middle, the shock of ice appeared. And it was just impossible. It was impossible. But we were passing through the triple point, the point at which the temperature and pressure conditions are such that water can exist as a liquid, a gas, and a solid at the same time. But it was just one of these reminders of just how incredibly alien Mars is. As much as it seems familiar, it's the planet that's most like the Earth that we've ever found of all the planets we've discovered in the night sky. It's still just indescribably boring.

Just wonderful. And that dust got into everything, didn't it? As something stayed with you. I do. I remember thinking as I wrote the book, Osha probably would not like me talking about how I had all of this dust cracked, like in the fingerprints and the cracks of the seats in the van, and it would fall out from my clothes onto the floorboards of this old house we were all living in on Stanford's campus. Probably a grain or two of it left in your lungs, which I'm sure will not do any damage, but it's kind of romantic to think so. Kind of like the people I know, the great science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson,

who told the story on our show of how he bought a bit of a Mars meteorite, went up on his roof looking at Mars and ate it so that it would be incorporated into his body. There you have it. That's great. That's such a great story. You divide the book up into three major sections. The titles of each are drawn from Euclid and his geometry, and the scope expands from section to section, like from a point to a line.

Is there a metaphor here for our expanding knowledge of Mars? I think so. I think so. I write about that a bit in the last chapter of the book. Euclid is somebody that had a lot of influence on me, especially when I was younger. For a while, I sort of toyed with the idea of becoming a mathematician. And I'd really found so much beauty and meaning in how Euclid had built this understanding of the world, especially encapsulated in his beautiful book, Youth for Its Elements. And it's really spare and poignant, but it just sort of walks us through

beginning at very first principles to this incredible system, this understanding of how the natural world works with geometry and with number theory. I think I just see that all of our fields of science that we have approached as humanity, we've had to start at these very first principles and we build and we build and we build. And especially that's so clear with Mars. I mean, Mars was a point of light in the night sky and really over the last 50 years, since the dawn of the space age. And we've been able to send missions.

And starting in 1965, we had our first pictures of that planet. And we've had so many flying dallys and twists and turns and all these things that have resulted in this truer understanding of this distant world. And there just seems to be lots of parallels there to me. More of Sarah Stewart Johnson and the sirens of Mars is coming right after this break. Greetings once again, Plan Red listeners. Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, CEO of the Planetary Society. You and I know better than to ask if another world shattering asteroid will come our

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slash defend earth. Thank you for helping us save the world. I'm so glad you mentioned those first close-up pictures of Mars. The book is a wonderful chronicle of really the history of Mars exploration and speculation. And there are these wonderful characters whose lives you take us into. And one of them is Bob Layton of the Jet Propulsion Lab. Can you tell us about him and what he accomplished? Because I think we can largely thank him for those images from Mariner 4. Absolutely. And I guess it's hard to understand now,

4? Absolutely. And I guess it's hard to understand now, but there really was this time where one of the prevailing views was that pictures, pictures were, you know, public relations, pictures were science. We'd sent the Mariner 2 mission to Venus, no cameras there. And when Mariner 4 came along, you know, there was a period in which it was really unclear that there were going to be pictures at all. You know, there was a lot of focus on different types of measurements about temperature and pressure and those types of things. Bob Layton was somebody that really, really could appreciate the value of an image and what it really meant to see something. And he had grown up in Los Angeles, you know, he had a single mom who worked as a maid in a hotel. And he'd been really scrappy, gotten himself through school, and he'd gotten a job working as a photographic assistant at an

advertising company. One day, he made a mistake, he threw away a bunch of negatives, and he got his walking papers. And he decided that, you know that he'll go back and decide to go study physics instead. And we can all thank him for that big mistake because he eventually found his way to Caltech and he stayed there for the rest of his career. And even as a young professor, he would spend a lot of time up at Mount Wilson and he would make these beautiful movies of Mars using those great telescopes. And you'd have to use them on holidays, times where other people weren't using them. And I think there's a big feeling at the moment that, you know, planets, they were too close and too cold. They couldn't really tell us really important things about the nature of the universe.

And there's a lot of pressure to be kind of looking out further. But he really liked looking at Mars and he made these beautiful color images. And then one of his students had ties to JPL and said, you know, you've got to propose this instrument. And he did. He proposed this incredible instrument that ended up taking 21 photographs and a few lines in the 22nd photograph as Mariner 4 swept across the surface of Mars in a flyby of 1965 in July of that year. Unfortunately, those pictures caused a great deal of disillusionment, disappointment

for Mars scientists. And there seemed to have been more than one period of disillusionment as we have studied the red planet. Not just failed missions, because we've had some of those too, but missions like Mariner 4 that indicated, at least at first glance, that the chance of life on Mars was slim or nil. Another great story you tell along these lines is of the co-founder, one of our three co-founders of the Planetary Society, Carl Sagan, who, of course, was an early big believer in the importance of images of these places that our robotic ambassadors were visiting, along with Bruce Murray, who was a real fighter for putting cameras on spacecraft, former director of JPL, of course. But Carl, I guess I'm thinking more in terms of the Viking mission here, which Carl really fought to make sure would be life detection missions and even wanted to make sure there was a camera that could capture anything crawling across the surface. He took a lot of heat for some of these positions, didn't he?

Oh, he did. I think Carl Sin will always be a hero of mine. I feel like he's just such a broad thinker, such an imaginative thinker. And even going back before Viking, we had these first images and they were covered with craters. And Mars just looked like the lifeless moon. If the planet had that many craters, it couldn't have had plate tectonics. It couldn't have had the kind of fluvial erosion that we have here on Earth. It was just this desolate, barren, empty surface.

And the New York Times, after those first images were released, it declared a staggering disappointment that Mars was probably a dead planet. Carl Sagan never wanted to be dissuaded. He had taken a set of images, not just from Mariner 4, but the following flyby missions, and he found a parallel set of images that were the same resolution of the Earth. And he looked at them and he said, this is astonishing. You know, here's this world that's completely covered by life, not just life, but intelligent life. And you can't tell at that scale.

You cannot see these major cities. They're just invisible at that scale. And even when you get to higher resolution, looking at some of the images taken by the Apollo and the Gemini astronauts, you still couldn't really make sense of it unless you knew what you were looking for. You know, a road or the edge of a tilled field. Like those would only make sense if you knew what it is you were trying to see. And so I loved that story. And even going into the Viking mission.

So there were these life detection experiments that were part of Viking. And Carl Sagan was part of a different team. He was on the imaging team. And then he said, well, hold on, you know, these cameras or the instrument just with a single measurement might be able to detect life. He really pushed to have, you know, these cameras that were working and imaging.

And even if, you know, something walked by, we couldn't see it. He wanted to be able to image the footprints. And one of the, one of my favorite concepts, if something walked by, we couldn't see it. We wanted to be able to image the footprints. One of my favorite concepts, hypotheses that he had was that we might even find what he called macros on Mars as opposed to microbes. And he theorized that because it was so cold and so very dry, that conservation of heat and moisture were going to be critical for organisms in this sort of environment. And as a small cell, you had not so much volume, but a lot of surface area. But if you were a very large creature, you would have much less surface area per volume. And so

it would make it easier for you to conserve heat and moisture. And he said, you know, evolution could have favored these very, very large creatures. And this was, of course, a time where polar bears were, you know, out and roaming the tundra, these ecosystems that were really now coming into the popular imagination as habitats. And he said, you know, we could find these huge petrophages or crystallophages, you know, that are living there on the surface of the planet. And we shouldn't be too quick to write off these large creatures. And even though we didn't find them, he sure thought about these things in wonderful novel ways. And in some ways, he wasn't that far off because you later described one of the great reversals of this disappointment about the surface.

When we realized, when we learned that there was a lot of water on Mars, you just had to look under the surface. You had to dig for it. Like you, I was thrilled when the Phoenix Lander began to scrape away at the surface. Remind us of what it found. The Phoenix Lander was a great mission. It was only a few months. It wasn't, you know, sort of like opportunity that lasted 15 years. But in those few months there in those cold, cold, cold polar conditions, Phoenix had a scoop. And once it got under the Martian soil, you know, found this incredibly

gleaming white patch. And there was so much excitement. And pretty clearly, we realized that that couldn't be solved. That had to be actual ice and water ice and the chemical experiments confirmed that. And then we had all kinds of orbital missions as well that have detected subsurface ice. And we found gullies, we found all kinds of evidence for thin films of water. And so it's not just the ancient water, but, you know, there still is a fair amount of water, swimming pools and swimming pools worth of water that are, you know, that's locked into the shallow subsurface and, of course, the polar caps of Mars.

I also want to thank you on behalf of the Planetary Society for mentioning the special cargo that Phoenix brought to the Red Planet, that mini DVD, sort of a library of Mars. Yes, it was a wonderful effort by the Planetary Society. It is so funny to think of it now. There was a period when those mini DVDs were all the rage. And of course, nowadays, they're very dated, but patterned into that, so recorded onto that mini dvd where these this tremendous

collection the whole library and they include early science fiction writers they go back all the way to voltaire including a beautiful micromega story which i also write about in the book it has people talking and telling stories martha. Clarke next to a waterfall talking about his hopes and his imagines. And it's just the most marvelous kind of expression of our humanity. And to think that it will be preserved on the surface for millennia to come, you know, it might even outlast their own civilization. It's just a very profound thing to contemplate. Again, I'm very glad that you mentioned that story by Voltaire, Micromigas, about this gigantic alien, I mean, really gigantic, who visits Earth and is shocked to find life that

is unlike any he has ever known. It actually reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book that my grandson most loves for me to read to him, Horton Hears a Who, because a person's a person no matter how small. Lots of parallels there to the work that you do. Oh, that's such a great book. I know it well. Yeah, and it's so funny that, you know, even Voltaire, hundreds of years ago, was thinking about these same kinds of ideas. You know, in that story, it's this 120,000-foot-tall giant that arrives on Earth, and of course it looks lifeless. And then eventually he notices there's this speck down below,

and he leans in, and it's a shell that he picks up on the edge of his finger, and he examines it and he eventually can hear the voices of these tiny sailors and it's just such a such a nice allegory you know it really brings to mind this idea of you know when we go about searching for life you know do we have the scale right do we have the time scale right do we have the scale right? Do we have the time scale right? Do we have the size right? Are we looking in the right space to really find it? Or are we just kind of trapped by our own existence and looking for what we know? Well put, whether you're describing that story or your own work. There are a lot more of these personal stories in the book. We can't go through

all of them, of course, but there is one more I think we should talk about because you devote many pages to the story of Maria Zuber, who eventually became a mentor to you. Maria is just one of those extraordinary scientists. I first heard Maria give a talk when I was in college. And I write about that a bit in the book as well, just this moment when I realized it was the first woman I'd ever heard give a talk on planetary science. And she was describing the just fantastic results that came back from the Mars Global Surveyor Mission and specifically the MOLA instrument, which was measuring topography in exquisite resolution. I just remember looking at those maps as an undergraduate sitting in this crowded conference room. And it really shone to me like a church window. And Maria, who seems so

impossibly small behind the podium, I mean, she just took us on this tour de force through the new science, and I was just wrapped. It was really quite a moment. And then years later, I had the opportunity to study with her at MIT, and she agreed to take me on as her PhD advisee. You know, she was able to really pull back the curtain and show me what planetary science was like. And she was really at the pinnacle of her field. And she was the first woman to ever lead a planetary mission by NASA. And so she was, you know, breaking glass ceilings left and right. She was also just this incredible person you know she had grown up in coal country in Pennsylvania

and you know had lots of siblings and her parents really couldn't quite understand why she stayed in school for as long as she did um but she had gone through was the first person in her high school to ever earn a PhD and then she's now the vice provost for research at MIT. And she's just the most extraordinary woman, you know, not just as a scientist, but as a human being. Hmm. So here we are, 2020. We've learned so much about the red planet, you know, going back to the times of Galileo through Chaparralian, Lowell, and even the early days of Maria Zuber's career and Carl Sagan. Now we've got three more missions on their way to Mars, including Perseverance, the descendant of Curiosity. But the first to go back to the red planet since Viking that will actually be headed there to actively look for life.

This has got to be very exciting for you. Indeed, it's like a watershed moment. You know, we had this lull 20 years after Viking, no Mars missions. And then we started back in the late 90s with this idea that we would follow the water. And then we just kept finding the water and finding the water and finding the water. And then the next step was to look for signs of habitability to really understand the context for life. And with the Curiosity rover mission,

we've also definitively found evidence of ancient habitable environments, places that have the ingredients, the essential elements for life, as we know it, as well as the building blocks, those kind of organic molecules from which a house of life can be built. Now we are finally, finally moving back to actively looking for biosignatures. And so Perseverance is going to kick off this breathtakingly ambitious campaign to collect samples from Jezero Crater, this exquisitely preserved river delta there on the surface of Mars, and then bring them back to Earth for study in different laboratories to look for evidence of ancient life. Right.

Awfully exciting, which is why we frequently talk about it on Planetary Radio. Let me ask you both as a scientist and someone who feels what our boss calls the passion, beauty, and joy of all of this. If Perseverance does its job, maybe it doesn't even have to wait for sample return, but maybe its microscope, after drilling down a little bit, finds something that looks an awful lot like evidence of past life, maybe microbial life on Mars. What will that mean to you and to science and to humanity? Well, I have to say, I'm not getting my hopes up too high for the immediate primary mission, because one of the things that we could find, I mean, it would be incredible if we looked into some ancient terrain and we found something that looked like a stromatolite, you know, from this ancient lake. But even so, like I think about here on Earth, we are having huge debates over, you know, what is and what isn't life from the ancient rock record. And part of that is we have

this overprinting of life and contamination, but we've really wanted to study those samples carefully to really be able to say definitively, okay, this was certainly life. It may be in many ways easier to find life on Mars because we don't have, we aren't messing with the signals in the same way that we are here on Earth. We haven't swallowed so much of the ancient crust. Those rocks have not been metamorphosed. But getting back to your original question, if we were to find something that looked like a smoking gun, and especially once we had that back in our labs

and we were able to confirm with multiple lines of evidence that this really looks like a real thing, I just think it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of modern science. We simply have one data point for life. All the life that we know of is exactly the same. It's this DNA-based stuff, carbon-based us. And if we had another data point, especially if it was a separate genesis, I just think that would be transformational. It would really get to so many of the fundamental questions we have about whether biology is just a consequence of energetic systems and how different

biologies might come into being. And I also think it would just be another kind of Copernican revolution in terms of how we see our place in the universe. Another Copernican revolution. My fingers are crossed. I got just one more question for you. Before I ask you to read a particularly lovely passage from the last chapter of the book. And this question, really, it's a thread that has run through our conversation,

runs through many conversations I have with researchers on this show. How is the story of Mars also a story about Earth? I like that question a lot. You know, science, it's not just about the science. It never is. You know, our exploration of Mars is about our human relationship to the planet. And we have brought so much passion and ingenuity and drive and just yearning to the search for light that I think is so reflective of who we are as a curious species. And in many ways, that's why I wanted to write the book because I just thought Mars needed a different type of treatment. There were just so many things that were poignant and beautiful and compelling about the endeavor that I just don't ever think would ever find expression

on the pages of scientific journals. And there's just so much about the mystery and the wonder of this quest. And I guess that's what I hope I accomplished with the project. I can assure you, speaking for myself, you absolutely did. And it is why I recommend this book so highly. Would you please take on reading this little passage that I sent you from the last chapter? Before you do, you're going to have to define one word, an ancient Egyptian term. Am I pronouncing this correctly? Akhet? I think that's right. You know, we're not actually sure how it's pronounced because the vowels have been lost to history. It's just the

hieroglyph in which we've reconstructed the word just with its consonants. But this was one of the seasons, the ancient Egyptians, there would be the flooding, the repeated flooding of the Nile Delta. And as the waters would come in, there would be this moment, the end of Akhet, when the waters would recede and you would finally be able to have solid ground once again. The quote, which is from the final chapter of the book, it starts with, what if life is a consequence of energetic systems? What if the nothing to something has happened time and again? And because of the chinks in our cavern are so small, we don't know it. For me, this is what the search for life amounts to. It is not just

the search for the other or for companionship, nor is it just the search for knowledge. It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form. That confirmation would be a rebuke to the cratered image of Mars, the acid waters, the sterile soil. It would stand in contradistinction to the finite life to which we are confined, to the finite planet we inhabit. Finding life, even if it is the smallest microbe, would, for me, be the end of a cat. It would be the first dry mound emerging from the limitless dark water,

an actual fact about the actual world, a truth, a beginning. It would be a shimmering hope that life might not be an ephemeral thing, even if we are. Just beautiful, Sarah. Thank you so much for reading that and for giving us this book, The Sirens of Mars,

Searching for Life on Another World, published by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. And here's a word to the wise. If you stick around for this week's What's Up segment, Bruce and I will mention that you might win a copy of The Sirens of Mars in this week's space trivia contest. Again, Sarah, thank you. Best of continued success as you continue your work there at Georgetown and across the void to Mars. And by the way, congratulations on achieving tenure at Georgetown University. Thank you, Matt. Thank you.

I really, I really appreciate it. It was such a pleasure to chat today. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Sarah Stewart Johnson, planetary scientist, seeker of life, and newly published author of The Sirens of Mars, which you'll have a chance to win as we head into What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, starring the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, that's Bruce Betts, who has, I haven't actually looked myself, but I'm told six different listings in the IMDb.

Yes, and they're missing a couple from blockbuster movies that I did. All right. Well, if that's a mystery to you, why I brought this up, it won't be when we get to answering the contest this week, coming up with that. All will become clear, as is, I hope, the sky over your head tonight so that you can see the things that Bruce is going to tell us about. Nice, nice. Well played, sir. Yes, the evening, well, both evening and pre-dawn are glorious planet-wise. We've got Jupiter and Saturn up in the south in the early evening, Jupiter being the super bright object, Saturn to its left looking yellowish. And also now coming up in the early evening, we've got Mars getting brighter and brighter through early October. And it is brighter

than any star in the sky, though still not quite as bright as Jupiter, looking reddish over in the east. And wait, if you look at it on September 5th, the evening of September 5th, the moon will be very close to it. If you happen to be in much of the central portion of South America, the moon will actually go in front of Mars. But if you're not, it won't. But it'll be very close. It'll be within a degree or two moon diameters for pretty much everyone who gets to see it. So that's September 5th. And then in the pre-dawn, you can't miss Venus.

It's going to be getting lower over the coming weeks and months, but it's up there for a while and looking super bright in the east in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It's, I can't believe another year has passed for me to tell you, Matt, hey, Star Trek, the original series premiered this week in 1966. Which is why this is known as Star Trek Day. 1866. Which is why this is known as Star Trek Day. And I think our colleagues at the Society are going to be celebrating that in our social media. Well, we have good friends out of the Star Trek universe.

Yeah, yeah. I think they're going to premiere a very cool video, which I won't talk about, but it's going to be such fun. I would talk about it, but you would probably cut it out. So I will just say it is very, very nice. Very cool. And one more this week in space history. 1977, Voyager 1 launched. It's still going, and we'll talk a little bit more about it in just a moment as we get to random space fact.

Don't be sad. I don't know what came over me. It's more of a happy emotion of Voyager. So every year, Voyager 1, as it heads out of the solar system, every year Voyager 1 travels about six times the Earth to Mars closest distance. Just racing on out there. It's amazing. Okay, let's move on to the trivia contest.

I said, as of now, August 2020, what is our Matt Kaplan's one credit on IMDb, the internet movie database? How'd we do, Matt? Was it weird for you? It was, yeah, odd. It was decidedly odd. Before we get to the answer, here is all the wrong answers from Mel Powell in California. He said, before I looked it up, he made a list of guesses. One, Enterprise Relief Communications Officer in Star Trek VI Undiscovered Country. Two,

M4PO Random random background droid at Mos Eisley, or three, Fido number three, uncredited in Apollo 13. Were you any of those, Matt? I was one of them. I won't tell you which one. Oh, man. That'll be next trivia contest. All right.

Keep going. Here's the response from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild in Kansas. Back in November of 2019, Matt and Mendoza were paired and worked on a mystery sighting of cats that took Fina quite unawares. In episode six, a catastrophe came, and that's how it all came to be, that Matt has his name for a single event you can find in the IMDb. What the heck is he talking about there? It's the Fina Mendoza Mysteries. Yes, that got me a credit, much to my surprise, as you discovered two weeks ago when you posed this question. you pose this question. My very good friend for a million years, Kitty Felde, author, playwright, actress, host, speaker, she wrote this book for kids, Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza.

Kitty was also a Washington, D.C. reporter for many years and got to know D.C. very well. And it's about this young girl, Fina Mendoza, who is the daughter of a new congressman. And she gets involved in this mystery having to do with a cat in the Capitol building. It is a book. You can find it at kittyfeldy.com, a little plug there. And it is also, it's listed as either a TV series or a podcast. It's really more of a radio drama, an episodic radio drama. That's how I would describe it. It's great fun. And I do have this little part in it. I think I'm in episode six. So there you go. That got me into the prized IMDb. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Oh, I should tell you who won.

Well, that's why i was you know leaving some dead space for you to fill that in usually it's kind of a kind of weird little tradition we've got it's a given leonard soika is given the prize this time around leonard in the state of virginia and he said he actually listened to episode six just to verify that I'm actually there. He made sure it was really me. It is. Leonard, he's a past winner, but it has been, get this, four years since he last won the contest. So congrats, Leonard.

You are going to get a copy of the Backyard Astronomer's Field Guide, How to Find the Best Objects in the Night Sky, or the Best Objects the Night Sky Has to Offer, I should say, by David Dickinson. It's terrific. It's loose leaf, as I said when we introduced this, so that you can take it outside and the wind probably won't blow the pages over while you're looking up at the night sky. It's an excellent, excellent field guide.

I got more stuff, of course. Here's a little poem from Maureen Benz. The rabbit hole was deep this week, a mystery to be solved. Would Fina find the demon cat? Would questions be resolved? The spooky saga continues forth as house historian Matt assists. Capitol Hill produces clues, although the mystery doth persist. Ooh.

Nick Bell in Indiana. While I was unable to find all of your Academy Award performances, I think Brad Pitt was credited with a few of your roles. You know, I've heard if they make a movie about his life, he wants you to play him. When they see pictures of us, we're confused all the time. I get it all the time on the street. Yep, you get a face for radio.

Sorry, Brad. A whole bunch of people found the other Matt Kaplan, who is the founder and CEO of what's described as a top-tier entertainment company. But he spells his name wrong. So, yeah, that's not me. Mark Dunning says, Thank you to Planetary Radio's Space Policy Edition and now the Fina Mendoza Mysteries. Now he says he has two things about

Washington, D.C. that aren't totally soul crushingly depressing. And finally, one more poem from Gene Lewin in Washington. His single credit for all to see listed there on IMDb. Fina Mendoza led to this fame as house historian. His acting name. This accolade does not reflect the true albedo of our respect. And we're all glad his true frontier led to planetary radio for all these years. Yay. I had to get that in.

I mean, it uses albedo, so. Thanks, everybody. We're ready for another one. What is the only spacecraft to launch with solar system escape velocity? So in other words, as it left Earth, it had enough velocity to escape the solar system. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So it didn't have to pick up any more velocity from little flybys, right?

Bouncing around to the planets. It was not required. The prize, oh, well, first of all, you have until the 9th. That's Wednesday, September 9th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one. And the prize, should you have it right and be chosen by random.org, is the book that we were just talking with Sarah Stewart Johnson about. Her book, The Silence of Mars, Searching for Life on Another World, available from Crown. And it is as good as you heard me saying during that conversation. So good luck, everybody.

And good luck to you, Bruce. Go after that seventh internet movie database entry. Well, you know, they're missing a couple. I'll work on that. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about what role Matt Kaplan may have played in The Lord of the Rings.

Thank you and good night. I don't want to give any hints away. My precious. Actually, I was in a sitcom pilot, but it never went anywhere. What? Yeah, that's a story for another day. That's Bruce Betts. He's the chief scientist for the Planetary Society

who joins us here and in the IMDb every week for What's Up. I'd watch your sitcom. No, it kind of sucked. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its lively members. Live it up with them at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

Ad Astra.